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Spotlight on Optics

Highlighted Articles from OSA Journals

January 2010

Spotlight Summary by

Light propagation in three-dimensional photonic crystals

Researchers implement three-dimensional photonic crystal waveguides. To form these waveguides, they introduce defects in a woodpile photonic crystal composed of eight stacked layers of rods. Low-loss guiding at near-infrared frequencies is shown both for vertical (perpendicular to the rods) waveguides as well as for L-shaped ones composed of a vertical and a horizontal waveguide (created by removing a segment of a rod). This work constitutes an important step toward the controlled three-dimensional guiding of light in photonic crystal devices.